Page 47 of The Dangerous Dance

She is quiet for a moment. Then: "Come home. I'll make tea."

"I'll be there in thirty minutes."

I walk. The city moves around me in its usual way, indifferent and continuous, and I think about the word home and the word protection and the specific weight of please when you mean it, and the yellow security light that was on all day above a car park that nobody uses.

And I don't step back from any of it.

CHAPTER 17

Liam

The ambush happens on a Wednesday.

We're moving product through the secondary route that Declan's south distribution plan identified — a route I approved, a route I put men on, a route that two weeks ago was clean and which someone has clearly been watching since I signed off on it. The call comes through at half past eleven at night from Conor, who uses the specific phrasing he uses when casualties are involved, and which I've heard enough times that my body responds to it before my mind has finished processing the words.

Three men down. One critical. The product is gone, the vehicle is burned, and the two men who weren't down scattered into the surrounding blocks and are currently being collected by Conor's secondary team. The ambush was professional — coordinated entry and exit, clean extraction of the product, no engagement beyond what was necessary to clear the road. Not opportunistic. Planned.

I'm in the car in four minutes.

The scene is on a service road in Maspeth that smells like burning rubber and cold metal, and the men who are walking have the specific quality of men who are still running on adrenaline and will feel the full shape of what happened in about two hours when it wears off. I check them. I check the one who isn't walking, who is being stabilized by someone Conor called in and who will live, the medic tells me, but who will need a hospital in the next hour. I make the calls that get him a hospital bed without a police report.

I'm crouched at the burned vehicle, looking at the entry and exit points, when the parting shot comes.

One round. From a rooftop two blocks east — someone watching the scene who hadn't fully left, taking one last try at whoever showed up after the fact. It punches the vehicle frame six inches from my shoulder, and the ricochet catches my arm before any of my men have brought their weapons up. By the time Conor's secondary team is on the rooftop, the shooter is gone.

I look at the burn pattern and the way the product was extracted and the angle of the parting shot, and I think about Declan's south distribution plan, which I approved, and which laid out this route in detail, and which I gave back to Declan to run.

I stand in the cold of a service road in Maspeth and I think about Connolly.

Nadia is at the apartment in Astoria when I call. She came back to the safehouse the day after she left, as we agreed, and went back to Astoria yesterday to make her scheduled check-in with Viktor and keep the cover alive. It is not a clean arrangement. It is what we have.

She answers on the second ring.

"Don't say anything," I tell her. "I need somewhere that isn't the compound or the safehouse for a couple of hours. Is the apartment clear."

A brief pause. "Yes. What happened."

"I'll tell you when I get there."

She gives me the building entrance code.

She opens the door in a way that tells me she's been awake, which means either she doesn't sleep well or she was waiting, and I don't ask which because I'm bleeding through my jacket sleeve and my head is splitting and I'm holding the specific kind of anger that has to be kept at a controlled temperature or it becomes something I can't use.

She sees the jacket sleeve immediately.

"Sit down," she says.

"It's not⁠—"

"Sit."

The apartment is small and organized with the specific neatness of someone who keeps everything in reach because they might need to leave quickly. There is a kitchen table and two chairs and a couch that faces a window with a view of the street below, and I sit in one of the kitchen chairs because it's closer and because I am, now that the adrenaline has fully organized itself into exhaustion, more tired than I was twelve minutes ago.

She gets a kit from under the bathroom sink. Not a first aid kit from a pharmacy — a proper one, the kind assembled by someone who knows what they're preparing for, which tells me another thing about her father and the education he provided. She sets it on the table and sits across from me and holds out her hand.

I give her the arm.

She works in silence. The jacket comes off, the shirt sleeve up, and the cut is a graze from a ricochet, which means someone's angle was off or I moved at the right moment and the difference between this being a graze and something else is the specific geometry of one second. She cleans it with the focused efficiency of someone who has done this before and who is doing the work rather than performing feelings about the work, which is what I need right now.